Today’s Telegraph has an amusing curious item today concerning an MI6 agent, Lt Col Dudley Clarke, who was arrested in a street in Madrid “dressed down to a brassiere as a woman”,
Clarke had been running a GCHQ deception operation in Cairo using the cover of a newspaper reporter and had traveled to Madrid to meet Hamilton Stokes, the head of the MI6 station there. After leaving Stokes on October 17 1941, he was arrested by the Spanish police dressed, for no reason ever explained, in women’s clothing.
He at first told them he was a novelist studying the reactions of men to women in the streets and then that he “was taking the feminine garments to a lady in Gibraltar and thought that he would try them on for a prank.”
“This,” reported the British Embassy in Madrid to London, “hardly squares with the fact that the garments and shoes fitted him.”
The police were inclined to believe that Clarke was a “homosexualist” Stokes reported, but the German secret police, the Gestapo, alleged he was a spy.
After four days in custody he was eventually released and returned to Cairo where he “went on to have a brilliant career in deception,”
The tale is recounted in the first authorised history of the Secret Intelligence Service.
I wonder if the book has more tales of transvestite derring-do? To Samarkand in silk stockings? Berlin in a basque? I hope that the book is full of salacious tales!
13 comments:
I love the term "homosexualist"
He makes for a handsome woman indeed!
Ooooh, let's all crossdress tonight.
Respect to him for wearing those heels...I couldn't!
It's a god one Nursie!
Not too shabby Knatolee!
I will pass James
Neither could I Ruth!
Hmm, wonder if he was caught by a 5:00 shadow?
Haha Sandy perhaps that was his downfall!
When I grew up in Toronto the only day it was legal for transvestites to be outside was Hallowe'en. I wonder if that's changed?
One way to find out Susan!
Gives one a new perspective on possible new James Bond series ;-)
Licensed to kill... in Janet Regers!
Susan... Yes. It has changed in Toronto, which has one of the largest Gay Pride Parades in North America.
Sadly, one of Britain's greatest mathematical minds, Alan Turing, who cracked the German "Enigma" codes, was arrested, outed, forced to have "treatments" to beef up him male hormones and urges (thus avoiding the normal two-year jail term), and eventually (allegedly) committed suicide - simply because he admitted to being a homosexual and engaging in homosexual acts.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-turing-enigma-campaigners-demand-pardon-for-mathematics-genius-1773480.html
`Anneke the treatment of the man who did more than any British General to defeat the Nazis is a stain - one which was partly addressed only recently
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